Darker Than You Think

by Jack Williamson

  Barbee stammered his thanks, choked with a sudden tightness in his throat. Preston Troy wasn't altogether bad, he decided. Perhaps he had been a little too severe in his own judgments on the Walraven campaign and that rather sketchy circumstantial evidence in April Bell's apartment.

  Yielding again to Miss Graulitz, Barbee decided that he didn't need to drive back to Clarendon for his toothbrush and pajamas, or even to attend Rex Chittum's funeral. Obediently he followed her along the covered walk from the main building to a long red-tiled annex.

  She conducted him through the library, the music room, the games room, the hobby room, and the dining room. She introduced him casually to several persons— leaving him uncertain which were staff members and which patients. He kept watching uneasily for any glimpse of Mrs. Mondrick, and presently inquired about her.

  "She's in the disturbed ward," the nurse boomed softly. "That's the next budding, around the quadrangle. I hear she's worse today—something upset her when she was out for her walk. She doesn't have visitors, and you won't be seeing her until she's much better."

  Nurse Graulitz left him at last in a room of his own on the second floor of the annex, with the injunction to ring for Nurse Etting if he wanted anything. The room was small but comfortable, with a neat little bath adjoining. He had been given no key for the door.

  The windows, he noticed, were of glass reinforced with steel wire, steel-framed, adjusted so that nothing much larger than a snake could escape through them. But all that would scarcely be enough to imprison him if he should dream again—he grinned wryly at the fleeting thought—because they hadn't been clever enough to use silver wire.

  So this was madness!

  He washed his face and sweaty hands in the tiny bathroom—noticing that everything was cunningly designed, with no sharp edges anywhere, or any support for a noose. He sat down wearily on the side of the bed and loosened his shoelaces.

  He certainly didn't feel insane, he reflected—but then did any lunatic, ever? He merely felt confused and utterly exhausted from his long struggle to master situations that had finally been too much for him. It felt good just to rest for a while.

  Barbee had wondered about insanity, sometimes with a brooding dread—for his own father, whom he scarcely remembered, had died in the forbidding stone pile of the state asylum. He had vaguely supposed that a mental breakdown must be somehow strange and thrilling, with an exciting conflict of horrible depression and wild elation. But perhaps it was more often like this, just a baffled apathetic retreat from problems grown too difficult to solve.

  He must have fallen asleep in the midst of such gray reflections. He was vaguely aware of someone trying to rouse him for lunch, but it was after four by his watch when he woke. Somebody had slipped off his shoes and spread a sheet over him. His nostrils felt stuffy and his head ached faintly.

  He wanted a drink. Perhaps he could have smuggled in a pint. Even if whisky had put him here, he still had to have a drink. At last he decided, not very hopefully, to try Nurse Etting. He sat up and pushed the button that hung on a cord at the head of his bed.

  Nurse Etting was rangy and tanned. She had a comic-strip buck-toothed face, and she appeared to have wasted unavailing pains on her mouse-colored hair. Her rolling walk suggested that her athletic legs were bowed, reminding him of a rodeo queen he had once interviewed. Yes, she told him in her flat nasal voice, he could have one drink before dinner today and not more than two afterward. She brought him a generous jigger of very good bourbon and a glass of soda.

  "Thanks!" Surprised to get the drink, Barbee still felt a dull defiance toward the smug assurance of Dr. Glenn and the briskly courteous efficiency of the staff. "Here's to the snakes!"

  He tossed off the whisky. Unimpressed, Nurse Etting rolled out with the empty glass. Barbee lay back on the bed for a while, trying to think over what Glenn had told him. Perhaps that ruthless materialist was right. Perhaps the were-wolf and the were-tiger had been all hallucination—

  But he couldn't forget the peculiar vividness of his sensations, padding over crisp frost through the fragrant night, seeing the starlit hills with such wonderful sharpness through the eyes of that mighty saber-tooth. He couldn't forget the warm feel of the naked girl astride him, or the savage power of his leap, or the hot, sweet-smelling spurt of Rex Chittum's blood. For all Glenn's convincing arguments, nothing quite so real as that dream had ever happened to him awake.

  The drink had relaxed him again, and he still felt drowsy. He began to think it would be very easy for a snake to slide out through the futile glass-and-steel barrier of that window as soon as the daylight had gone. When he went back to sleep, he decided, he would just change into a good, big snake and go back to call on April Bell. If he happened to find the Chief in bed with her—well, a thirty-foot constrictor should be able to take care of a fat little man like Preston Troy.

  The radiator snapped, and he flung himself off the bed with a startled curse. Such notions wouldn't do at all—Glennhaven was supposed to cure him of those dreams. His head was choked up and still throbbing slightly, but he couldn't have another drink until after dinner. He washed his face in cold water and decided to go downstairs.

  Barbee had always wondered about mental institutions. He thought of taking notes for a feature story on this adventure; but Glennhaven, as the evening wore on, began to seem remarkable for utter lack of anything noteworthy. It began to appear as a fragile never-never land, populated with timid souls in continual retreat from the real world outside and even from one another within.

  In the music room, when Barbee got a news bulletin on the radio about a traffic accident, a thin, pretty girl dropped a tiny sock she had been knitting and hurried out, sobbing. He played checkers with a pink-faced, white-bearded man who managed to upset the board every time Barbee crowned a king and then apologized profusely for his clumsiness. At dinner, Dr. Dilthey and Dr. Dorn made a painful and not very successful effort to keep a light conversation going. Barbee was glad to see the early autumn twilight thickening outside the windows. He went back to his room, rang for the nurse, and ordered his two permissible drinks at once.

  Nurse Etting had gone off duty, and a pert, painfully vivacious little brunette named Jedwick brought his two jiggers of bourbon and a mushy-looking historical novel he hadn't asked for. She fussed needlessly about the room, laying out pajamas and felt-soled slippers and a red robe for him and straightening the bed, obviously trying to be cheery. He was glad when she left him alone.

  The two drinks made him very sleepy, although it was only eight by his watch and he had slept most of the day. He began to dress for bed and stopped to listen uneasily. Somewhere far away he had heard a thin, strange howl.

  Dogs on the farms about Glennhaven began barking savagely, but he knew it wasn't a dog that had howled. He hurried to the window to listen, and caught another eerily quavering howl. It was the sleek white wolf bitch. She was down by the river, waiting for him.

  Barbee examined the steel and reinforced glass of the window again. He saw no trace of any silver anywhere—Glenn, in his dogmatic materialism, must have rejected all the evidence for the mental determination of probability. It ought to be easy enough to change into a satisfyingly formidable snake and go down to meet April Bell. He heard her howling again and went breathless with a trembling eagerness.

  He turned toward the high, white hospital bed—and cold dread stopped him. By the rational scientific logic of Dr. Glenn, he must cherish an unconscious jealous hatred of Sam Quain and Nick Spivak. In the mad logic of his dreams, April Bell was still resolved to destroy them because of the unknown weapon they guarded in that wooden box.

  He felt sick with a shuddering fear of what the snake might do.

  He delayed going to bed. He scrubbed his teeth with a new brush until the gums bled. He took a deliberate shower and carefully trimmed his toenails and put on white, too-large pajamas. Wrapped in the red hospital robe with Glennhaven embroidered across the back, he sat up in the one chai
r for an hour trying to read the novel Nurse Jedwick had brought. All the characters, however, seemed as gray and flat as the people he had met downstairs—

  And the she-wolf was howling again.

  She was calling, but he felt afraid to go. He wanted to close the window, to shut out her wild cry and the angered barking of the dogs. He started impatiently across the room and a fainter sound checked him, shivering. It was a woman's screaming, muffled and somewhere near, monotonous and dull, dreadful with a full abandonment to horror and despair—and he knew Rowena Mondrick's voice.

  He slammed the window hastily, and took his book to bed. He tried not to listen for Rowena screaming in the disturbed ward, or the white wolf calling from the river. He tried to read again and fought the pressure of sleep. But the words made no sense. He hated the dull bleak world of crushing frustration where the blind woman screamed, and yearned for the bright release of his dreams. He surrendered, suddenly, to that new reality, and reached eagerly to snap off the light.

  The book slipped out of his hands—

  Only he didn't have hands. He glided away from the gaunt empty thing that lay breathing very slowly in the bed. He let his long body flow across the rug and lifted his flat, triangular head to the window.

  The glass dissolved as his free mind reached out to find the linkage of probability and grasp the shivering atoms to be a part of himself as he passed. The embedded steel wire yielded more slowly, and there was no silver. Laughing silently at Glenn's mechanistic philosophy, he poured out silently over the sill. He dropped on the lawn in a mound of powerful coils, and went twisting down toward the dark trees by the river.

  The white bitch came trotting to meet him out of a clump of willows, her long slanted eyes shining eagerly greenish. He flicked out his slender black tongue to touch her icy muzzle, and the shining scales of his thick body rippled to the strange ecstasy of that kiss.

  "So it was too many daiquiris," he jibed, "that made you feed me that witchcraft yarn?"

  She laughed, her red tongue lolling.

  "Don't torment me any more," he begged. "Don't you know you're driving me insane?"

  Her mocking eyes turned gravely sympathetic.

  "I'm sorry, Barbee." Her warm tongue licked his flat snout affectionately. "You must be bewildered, I know—the first awakenings are always painful and disturbing, until you learn the way."

  "Let's go somewhere," he urged, and a shudder ran along his coils. "Rowena Mondrick is screaming back there in her room. I can't bear it. I want to get away from here and all this uncertainty. I want to forget—"

  "Not tonight," the she-wolf interrupted. "We'll have fun, Barbee, when we can. But tonight we still have work to do. Three of our great enemies still live—Sam Quain and Nick Spivak and that blind widow. We've got her where she can't do anything worse than scream, but your old friends Spivak and Quain are still at work. They're learning. They're getting ready to use the weapon in that wooden box."

  In her eyes blazed a sudden feral fury.

  "We must stop them—tonight!"

  Reluctantly, Barbee shook his broad black head. "Must we—kill them?" he protested faintly. "Please —think of little Pat and poor Nora—"

  "So it's poor Nora now?" The she-wolf mocked his tone maliciously. Her fangs nipped at the loose, scaled skin of his neck, half playfully and yet with a savage force. "Your old friends must die," she told him, "to save the Child of Night."

  Barbee objected no more. In this glorious awakening from the long nightmare of life, all his values were changed. He whipped two turns of his tapering tail around the white bitch's body and squeezed until she gasped.

  "Don't worry about Nora," he told her. "But if a dinosaur happened to catch Preston Troy in bed with you, it might be just too bad."

  He released her, and she shook her white fur primly.

  "Don't you touch me, snake in the grass." Her voice was honey and vitriol.

  He reached for her again. "Then tell me what is Troy to you."

  She sprang away from his reaching tail.

  "Wouldn't you like to know?" Her white fangs grinned. "Come along," she told him. "We've got a job to do tonight."

  The undulations of Barbee's body thrust him forward beside her in flowing waves of power. The friction of his polished scales made a soft burring sound on the fallen leaves. He kept pace with the running wolf, his lifted head level with her own.

  The night world was oddly different to him now. His scent was not so keen as the wolf's had been, nor his vision so sharp as the saber-tooth's. He could hear the gentle sigh of the river, however, and the rustle of mice in the fields, and all the tiny sounds of sleeping animals and people in the dark farm buildings they passed. Clarendon, as they approached it, became a terrific din of drumming motors and screaming tires and raucous horns and howling radios and barking dogs and droning, wailing, bellowing human voices.

  They left the highway at the Cedar Street intersection and turned across the dark grounds of the Research Foundation. Light shone yellow from the ninth-floor windows of the gray tower where Spivak and Quain fought their secret war against the Child of Night; and a faint, noisome fetor was evil in the air.

  The locked front door made a path for them as they reached together to grasp it, and they came into the painful brightness of the central hall. That poisonous reek was stronger inside, but the snake wouldn't be so sensitive to it. Barbee hoped, as the gray wolf had been.

  Two sharp-eyed men, both too hard and old for their university sweaters, sat wearily playing casino at the information desk outside the elevators. As the silent wolf and the great snake approached, one of them dropped his dog-eared cards and felt apprehensively for the police special at his hip.

  "Sorry, Jug, but I can't tell cards from spades." His voice was hoarse and anxious. "I tell you, this Foundation job is getting on my nerves. It looked pretty good at first—twenty bucks a day just to keep people out of that laboratory—but I don't like it!"

  The other gathered up the cards. "Why not, Charlie?"

  "Listen, Jug!" The big man tilted his head. "Every dog in town has suddenly gone to howling, and I can't keep from wondering what this is all about. These Foundation people are afraid of something—and it is right funny, come to think of it, the way old Mondrick died and Chittum got killed. Quain and Spivak act like they know they're next on the list. Whatever they've got in that mysterious box—I wouldn't look at it for forty million!"

  Jug peered down the shadowy hall, past the creeping wolf and the crawling snake, reaching unconsciously to loosen his own revolver.

  "Hell, Charlie, you just been thinking too much. On a special job like this, you ain't supposed to think. It's all legal and easy—and twenty bucks is twenty bucks." Jug stared bleakly through the wolf and the snake. "But I'd like to know. Me, I don't take much stock in this story about any curse the expedition dug up in those old graves—but they did find something."

  "I don't know," Charlie insisted. "I don't want to."

  "Maybe you think they're crazy." Jug's peering eyes roved toward the closed doors of the elevators and the stairway, and upward toward the vague, muffled sounds the snake could hear from the ninth floor. "Maybe they are. Maybe they just stayed off in them damn deserts too lone. Maybe—but I don't think so."

  Charlie blinked uneasily. "What do you think?"

  "I think they found something worth hiring special guards for." Jug caressed the grips of his revolver. "Me, I'd like to see what they've got in that precious box. Maybe it's really worth forty million." His voice dropped. "Maybe it was worth a couple of neat little murders to Mr. Spivak and Mr. Quain."

  "Deal the cards and forget that box," Charlie muttered. "This Foundation is a respectable scientific outfit, and twenty bucks is twenty bucks. We don't know what's going on upstairs, and we ain't paid to guess."

  He didn't see the sleek white wolf that trotted across the corridor in front of the desk, or the huge gray-and-black-patterned snake that writhed after her. She paused before the l
ocked door to the stairs, and it became a path for her free mind web and the snake's. Jug sat staring after them, snorting his weary impatience with Charlie's apprehensions and mechanically shuffling the cards. He didn't seem to see the opening in the door.

  The snake followed the wolf up eight dark flights. That musty malodor was thicker at the top of the stairs, a strange sweetness, sickeningly vile. The white wolf shrank and cowered from it, but the great snake rippled on. Another door turned misty as Barbee grasped it, and he beckoned with his flat head for the quivering bitch to follow him into the ninth-floor rooms.

  One of the rooms had been fitted with bench and sink and glass apparatus for chemical analysis. The burning fumes of reagents in it were drowned beneath the lethal reek that came from a pinch of gray powder drying on a paper filter. That room was silent except for the slow drip of water from a tap. The wolf and the snake recoiled from its deadly fetor.

  "See, Barbee!" The white bitch grinned feebly from her swaying illness. "Your dear old friends are trying to analyze that old poison, so they can kill us all."

  The next room they entered was a museum of articulated skeletons, hung smiling whitely from steel stands. Barbee peered about it uneasily with the great snake's eyes. He recognized the neatly strung bones of modern men and modern apes, and the white plastic reconstructions of the apelike frames of Mousterian and Chellean and Prechellean types of early man. Others puzzled him, however; the restored bones were too slender, the sneering teeth too sharp, the staring skulls too smooth and long. He crouched back from those strange skeletons, and something sent a shudder flowing down his armored coils.

  "See!" the white wolf whispered. "They're looking for measurements—for clues to find us—so they can use that poison."

  The room beyond was dark and silent. Colored wall maps showed the continents of today and those of the past; the edges of the ice fields in the glacial ages were drawn like battlelines. Locked glass cases held the notebooks and journals Dr. Mondrick had always kept— Barbee recognized his bold red lettering on the covers.